Debate’s tendency towards procedural interpretations is part and parcel of the desire to ontologically capture and destroy queerness.

[Lee Edelman, prof of english at tufts university, December 5, 2022, “Bad Education Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing”, Ch. 2, Duke University Press]//owen

For Derrida, of course, who famously declared, “Il n’y a pas de hors texte” (There is no outside of the text), the text, like the grammatological order, includes all its possible interpretations and all its possible disruptions, inviting, in the words of Rodolphe Gasché, “productive readings, readings that not only weave new interpretative threads into it but compose so many rewritings of it.”84 It constitutes an archive like Noah’s ark, bearing every potentiality and encompassing all that is yet to come. From Lacan’s perspective, however, there is always something “outside” the Symbolic, pressuring it from beyond the order of sense. We aim to relieve that pressure by naming it, ensnaring it in words intended to make it signify despite itself, reclaiming das Ding for the order of meaning from which “it was the first thing that separated itself ” when “the subject began to name and articulate.”85 Small wonder, then, that those names include the “incest” against which Hamlet rails, the “bin Ladenism” Derrida decries, and rubrics like “woman,” “Black,” or “queer” and all their innumerable companions, each with its distinct historical weight in the reality of human lives, but each effectively sublimating the Real by affirming that collective reality. 86 Without denying those historical differences, without scanting their toll on the persons who confront them or suggesting that any subject could, as subject, escape their reality, we can say, nonetheless, that such sublimations strip the Thing of “its absence, its strangeness,” and, in consequence, of its queerness. Bad education, by contrast, acknowledges the impossibility of realizing queerness (as opposed to figurally embodying it), and it engages the question Saidiya Hartman poses with trenchant precision after identifying those enslaved as occupying “the position of the unthought”: “What does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void?”87 This framing cuts to the heart of the problem by exposing our persistent belief that even the unthought must have a “position” and that our relation to whatever the unthought “is,” to whatever refuses the “positive value” acquired through sublimation, must still conduce to “meaning.” If Hartman, for all the brilliance with which she analyzes the problem, finds herself, nonetheless, bound to its terms, that is only because those terms allow neither her nor us any choice. They write themselves on the book of our brain so we think we can think the “unthought” as merely historically contingent, the not yet thought, rather than as what remains—like the nothing, the zero, the void—unthinkable. With the specter’s commandment “Remember me,” we forget the forgetting it induces: not only of the prior records it thereby prompts us to “wipe away” but also of the Thing no record or commandment could possibly contain, the Thing not accessible through any commandment or legible in any book—not even the one called Hamlet. But as modern literature’s specimen text, Hamlet is required reading, in part, for promoting reading’s capacity to assign a place to everything, including the queerness of the “wondrous strange” (1.5.166), in a Symbolic whose hospitality can “as a stranger give it welcome” (1.5.167). Through its profligate wordplay and its speculations on the meaningfulness of words, it enthralls us with the Symbolic’s order that everything “be or not be in a particular place”: the order of differential articulation, of or, whose logic sublimates, by narrativizing, the incest it makes unthinkable. Enshrining with its mandate to memory the pedagogical principle par excellence (the transmission of wisdom or techné in the service of survival), Hamlet, by its ceaseless performance of and incitement to interpretation, stokes the fantasy of mastery implicit in reading’s anticipation of meaning—a mastery, of the text and oneself alike, inseparable from aesthetic education. What could it mean to forgo the meaningfulness of pedagogical sublimation, to take seriously teaching’s status as an impossible profession and the teacher’s relation to the student as promoting—rather than cultural survival, the commandment to remember, or archival consignation—a radical queerness, a Socratic corruption, whose assault on meaning, understanding, and value would take from them more than it gives and leave them not with Hamlet’s name, but only with “O, O, O, O”? “What is someone who has been psychoanalyzed?” asks Jean Allouch, a French psychoanalyst, in his reading of Archive Fever. And he answers without hesitation: “He is . . . someone who no longer has a future.”88 We might say, therefore, that he is someone who faces the empty page of “freedom”— freedom, first and foremost, from the illusion of “being” himself—by confronting the drive to create ex nihilo, by renouncing the guarantee of meaning, and by refusing the endless returns of the father as the archive of what is to come. Hamlet has much to teach about investing in survival through a commandment’s transmission (though the play, while exposing that investment’s cost, redoubles it by transmitting that teaching), and it may, in a given system of values, teach us to be better readers, better students—perhaps better people too, depending on how one views “the good.” But what Hamlet does not and cannot teach, and what we can never know, is how to escape the framework of meaning that its teaching reinforces; how to decline the archival commandment that sublimates the nothing it also preserves; how to allow for not saying “yes” to the father’s imperative of life; how to let the future be by being what lets the future.89 We search in vain for a teaching that could make the nothing that undoes what “is” appear “without trying to fill in the void,” without assigning it a “position” in which its unthinkability would “mean.” To succeed in such a teaching would be, as Wilderson argues, “to destroy the world,” and to do so, as it were, for Real. But that’s what a bad education, an education in queerness or Blackness, must do: endeavor, against all hope, to teach us nothing